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Mangalore minidebconf day 2

This post would be a bit longish as it would talk/share about the last day of the minidebconf

Hi all,
First of all I forgot to share something about day 1 . One of the things that was interesting and which played out was we were supposed to do again on the second day a session for newbies but instead Pavi, in a moment on inspiration asked them to try the localized desktops. In all humility we did run into number of bugs while trying the localized desktops but as we had pretty limited time and net connectivity we didn’t focus on them. What we did was probably just an exercise in futility because all the localized dialog boxes and things we pointed out was in GNOME 2.30~32 whatever is/was in stable while in unstable it was GNOME 3.0.x and now GNOME 3.2.

The last day we started a bit late with a newbie session. Pavi took the opportunity to showcase JOSM . We started right from installing the newest stable version at that time which IIRC was 4666-7 while stable had 4279. He also did a short presentation which was quite cool, just wish he had posted it somewhere online.

Anyways, the rest of the time we explored the interface and we tried to correct some inaccuracies in the existing OSM that was there. We also saw one guy who had been doing some commits on the OSM of nearby areas although he had also started recently it seemed.

Then later in the day we were able to have a grand total of 2 devices, both were mobile devices with A-GPS support. One was Pavi’s Nokia N900 and the other guy had a Samsung Android something. We took quite sometime as today’s GPS devices take a significant time to locate stuff. As per Pavi it takes something like 20 minutes to get some sort of accurate fixes on specific places after which one can move around. There was a light drizzle and I had a slight runny nose as well as was not used to these sort of extreme climate changes as we were experiencing there during our stay.

Anyways we moved around, came back, plotted it using JOSM and using the data and uploaded it at the same time. The whole thing must have taken around 2 hours. One can see the results on OSM here as well as see Pavi’s reportage on the OSM wiki.

On another note, I do have high hopes for cheap GPS devices as GPS itself modernizes as well as GPS functionality either moves to SOC or becomes cheaper than it is today. I checked on a pretty range of devices after coming back and the cheapest ‘reliable’ GPS devices set you back by 7k and that has a warranty of around a year or a bit more so one cannot think of using or having it for casual use for large number of the population.

All in all, it was pretty entertaining and interesting culmination to the three days we were there for Minidebconf.

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